What to do when big news happens

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I did something I do very rarely this week: I turned on our television at home in the morning.

The reason, unsurprisingly, was the war in Iran. My goal was to get up to date with all the latest news.

And I did. If nothing else, rolling TV news stations are always quick on to the latest developments. That rolling chyron at the bottom of the screen demands fresh items as often as they are available.

The experience of turning on the TV got me thinking about what medium people instinctively turn to when they have heard something has happened. My journey is often social media/push notification for the breaking news; then TV to verify and see the very latest (often Twitter/X is just re-reporting TV coverage); then, later, news sites to get their analysis.

I suspect many people who are Gen X and above do the same. In fact, I know they do, having spoken to enough of them in user interviews.

Of course this is changing rapidly and there is a different pattern among younger users, who are entirely social first when it comes to the news. But I want to focus on how former newspapers react to big stories.

The natural impulse in any newsroom is to report like crazy when anything big happens and this was certainly the case this week. I looked at some major newspapers in the US and UK and counted how many stories about Iran they had on their homepages on Thursday afternoon, five days after the war/operation/whatever started. There were … a lot. The New York Times had 19; the Daily Mail 16; the Telegraph 14; the Wall Street Journal 13; The Times 9; and, checking out the tabloids, The Sun 7.

It’s a big story, you might say, it deserves this level of coverage. But think about these numbers in the context of user data from a broad number of publications which suggests that 90% of users will only read one story when a big event happens. About 5-8% of the remainder will read a second article, then the percentages move into decimal points for numbers above three. So that’s a lot of output and effort for not a lot of readers (the lead story usually gets the lion’s share of readership).

Also most of those stories are, to deploy a user need definition, of the “Update me” variety, which countless studies have shown that users value the least. Live blogs, and their single-article equivalents, drive traffic, but they do not drive loyalty.

The sites did have some very good and useful stories. The NYT had a great piece that was simply headlined: “Your questions”, which went through a lot of the unanswered ones I had. And for a lot of the day they had led with a piece of analysis. The Guardian sought to bring the voices of both ordinary Iranians and Americans to the fore. The Times pushed its opinion and analysis pieces high up.

So they were not all pure “breaking news”, which shows progress. But I feel there is still a lot of space left for them to move into when it comes to satisfying the user needs of “Give me perspective” and “Educate me”. These feel like the most profitable areas in an AI-mediated world. And all the more so if your potential customers are getting their primary news from social media, let alone TV.

I think there’s a lot of fear in newsrooms about “missing” stories if they cut back on their blanket coverage. But I am convinced that users won’t even notice. After all, they are not crawling round the web checking every single news site for every incremental update. Even if they visit a lot more often during times of crisis, we know that they are only reading one story each time. The idea should be for that story to be distinctive and valuable to the user.

I think there is more distinctiveness around at the moment. Though a lot of it comes through the prism of partisan commentary, especially in the UK, I think it is nonetheless a good thing.

But news sites need to still go further to prove their value in these challenging times, both for the industry and the world. This will require them to move further away from breaking news and towards analysis and opinion – and quickly.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the
transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]